Bamboo vs. GitLab

If you value integration over cost, Bamboo is clearly the way to go. It offers tight integration to the rest of the Atlassian suite, and when you need traceability from issue to build, Atlassian is the right way to go. However, if you find yourself needing to save on costs, you may consider taking an approach of rolling your own build system with open source alternatives, such as Jenkins, if you don't [mind] putting in a little extra elbow grease.

Incentivized

We started to use GitLab for hosting git source code repositories of our projects only but slowly we started to use it to store container images, packages, dependency proxy as well infrastucture registry and it is now well suited for Continuous Integration in our projects, It wasn't that good in Continuous Deployment before 12.0 version but after 12.0 it is amazingly good for Continuous Deployment as well since it keeps deployment information in a well organized manner which can be configure in ci yaml configuration.

Incentivized

• Levels of granularity. Organization has many projects that have many build plans that have many jobs that have many tasks, etc. And branch builds allow source control branches to be built separately.
• Versatility. I can use bamboo to manage my Java, node, or .NET build plans. I can use it to spin up Windows or Linux build agents, or install it on a Mac to build there as well.
• Bamboo integrates with other Atlassian products like Bitbucket, Stash, JIRA, etc. If a company commits to the entire Atlassian stack then work can be tracked through the whole development lifecycle which is really useful.

Incentivized

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

Incentivized

• Extremely hard barrier to entry for non-backend developers
• Blackbox makes it hard to customize functionality
• The inability to add features without breaking core functionality
• No cloud solution
• Tasks cannot be put in if/else statements
• No clear right way to form build plans

Incentivized

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

Incentivized

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Incentivized

Bamboo was fairly easy to navigate but in the end it always felt as if it was developed as a bolt-on and not a true group up user interface. There were multiple ways to get to everything and the path was never the same. So it was difficult for users to really get a feel of how to use the application.

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

Incentivized

Support for Bamboo has started lack a little over the years. Atlassian has been moving more towards Bitbucket Pipelines and away from the on-premise install of Bamboo. While the tool is still great, it may take a little bit of time to get a question answered by official support.

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

We selected Bamboo because its capabilities to integrate with other Atlassian products specially Jira Software, Bitbucket and in some useful scenarios with Confluence. Also, we found these pros important for us: great user interface, easily agent deployment, Docker compability, simply to maintain / manage, and straightforwardly integration with different notification platforms

Incentivized

GitLab is easily the preferred tool when it comes to versioning and source control. With other tools the UI often feels outdated and clunky leading to inefficiency and confusion. With some of the sleeker tools such as GitKraken, while the aesthetic is pleasing, the experience is plagued by a lack of support, lack of optional plugins, and a plethora of bugs that cause unnecessary legwork to resolve. GitLab is the best of both aesthetic and functionality

Incentivized

• It helped us achieve the Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration goals for our applications, a huge milestone that saved a lot of time for developers in making the builds and deployments and saved time for QA in running the automated tests.
• Helped with DevOps: we moved the formal approval from the email to the system and allowed the approver to actually push the button for the production deployments.
• Biggest positive impact of using Bamboo is that it improved our response time to customers and increased the frequency of our deliveries to them.

Incentivized

• We were able to streamline our project's codebase which made us very organised and laid out a proper plan for development.
• Our deployment and infra pipelines are well structured now making our process 10x faster.
• We are more focused into project building rather infra, as infra is totally on autopilot mode. Which has enabled us to grow our ROI by records.

Incentivized